


deep end

by MoonyJ4M



Series: deep end 'verse [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gender Identity, Pre-Series, Pre-Stanford, Slow Burn, Trans Character, Trans Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 17:59:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5507411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonyJ4M/pseuds/MoonyJ4M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam wonders if souls can wear out too, or if they even exist. If they do, hers must be in a bad shape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	deep end

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first part of this 'verse last year and since then have been thinking of expading it. I wanted to tell the story of what happens between the two moments in time in Lipgloss, so here is the beginning of it. Thanks a lot to [Askee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance) for beta reading it. All remaining mistakes are mine.  
> There is description and discussion of gender dysphoria, death, and canon-typical injuries. This is a story that leads to a happy ending, but it is not happy yet.

**october 1997;**  

Sam’s stomach drops the moment Dad puts the key of their motel room into Dean’s hand and then heads off to his own. For the first time since they had started taking different rooms, she wishes they still slept all bundled up in the same one; Dean wouldn’t dare to say anything about the lipgloss incident in Dad’s presence. He wouldn’t, right?

“So,” Dean begins, when they finish salting the door and settling their stuff on the beds; unpacking would be a too strong word, reserved for when they spent more than a month in the same place and actually needed to take their things out of the bags on a regular basis.

Sam’s blood gets cold. As much as Dean hadn’t freaked out on her since they left Richmond, she still isn’t sure she wants to have this conversation now; she isn’t even sure of what she is going to say.

They were sitting on their respective beds, in front of one another, and Dean just keeps waiting for her response. He hadn’t sound accusatory, but rather curious.

“Where’d you got that?” he tries. Sam knows it for the encouragement - bait? - it is, and takes the opportunity to dance around the subject gratefully.

“Stole it from a dollar store,” she says. She’d taken it the way she’d seen Dean doing, here and there, across the states; he snorts.

“Is this about you liking boys? ‘Cause, y’know, that part I already got.”

Sam takes a couple seconds to feel indignation about the question before the rest of the sentence sinks in. How the hell had he noticed _that_?

“You’re my brother, Sammy,” he explains, interpreting at least part of her flush correctly. Sam’s guts clench. “I know you. Besides, that crush of yours last year was kinda obvious.”

“I like girls too,” Sam provides, mortified at having to talk about it with Dean all of a sudden. She’d imagined that it was bound to happen one day, but so far it’d been more of an abstract concept than a real scenario. “But no, it’s not about liking boys,” _Although I thought it was_ , she thinks, but doesn’t risk adding. It had been a long way until she had come to terms with the fact that those things were not related. Suddenly she felt far older than fourteen. “I just… I wanted to look pretty.”

Sam regrets the words as soon as they leave her mouth; it sounds so _shallow_. Dean obviously won’t understand it if she isn’t even able to explain. Except that he is still looking at her, expectant.

“Like a girl?” he tries, and Sam has to admit that she is impressed. Dean wasn’t one to want to talk about stuff, but he didn’t seem to want to give up this time.

“Yeah,” she says carefully, staring at her hands. Big, traitorous hands. “I wanted it to make me look like a girl,” she continues then, feeling weird for talking like this, for admitting that in reality it was about _looking like_ \--emulating what a girl was supposed to be--because she wasn’t one. Not really.

Dean takes the few steps between their beds and sits beside her. He shifts a little before putting his arms around her, in a sideways hug that is a bit awkward until they get the hang of it. Dean is still bulkier than Sam, but they were almost the same height already and she knew that eventually she would surpass him. Her body was betraying her way too fast, and soon makeup wouldn’t be enough to make anyone believe she is a girl.

“You are kinda pretty,” he finally says, exaggerating a pensive face, and kisses her temple. Sam feels her chest lighten and smiles, a bit more relieved, for the first time since they’d left town. It’s a start. It’s definitely a start.

 

**may 1998;**

The second girl Sam kissed in her life immediately makes a habit of playing with her hair while they are at it. She is having a hard time saving it from being cut due to Dad’s insistence, and even Dean is trying to help her, trying to convince him that it won’t get in the way of hunting. Sam suspects it isn’t the only reason why he wanted it short, though; she does her best to look like a proper teenage boy way more thoroughly than she does to be a proper son by John’s standards - one’s got to pick their battles - but it isn’t impossible that he has begun to notice the little clues and started to think that his younger son wasn’t acting quite masculine enough.

Sam pushes these thoughts to the back of her head and turns her concentration back to the kissing. Kissing is pretty good, and Ann is tall enough to not feel little in Sam’s arms - God bless the basketball team. Sam had been growing like a goddamn weed since the minute she stepped into puberty, to her absolute terror. She’d had a small hope to keep lean, but there was no way to _not_ do physical activities being a Winchester, and chances were that one day she would bulk up just like Dean had. She hates every aspect of her life now, except maybe for the way Ann clings to her behind the benches of the gymnasium.

“You haven’t kissed a lot, have you?” Ann asks, breaking the kiss but keeping their faces only distant enough to not keep their mouths smashed together while she speaks.

“That bad?”

She grins and shakes her head, kissing Sam quickly once more before the bell rings. Sam watches her pick up her bag and run to her practice, still feeling kind of dreamy. Ann has that kind of mischievous smile that irritates the hell out of her and draws her at the same time; she wonders vaguely from where such specific feelings come when a whistle warns her that Dean has arrived.

“Sammy, Sammy, ” he says, sing-song. “So you do have good taste after all.”

“Just shut up,” she groans, slinging her backpack over one shoulder and reluctantly following him to the car. “You don’t have to pick me up everyday, you know? I can walk.”

“Yeah, sorry for taking your ungrateful little ass home instead of making you walk there.”

“It’s not that far,” she mutters half-heartedly, not really in the mood to put up a fight. Dean doesn’t insist either. “I’m gonna start swimming,” she says after a while.

“Really? That’s nice.”

“I guess.”

They cover the next few miles to their motel in silence. Sam doesn’t think of herself as the rebel Dean makes her sound like, but she does feel slightly bad for doing something _Dad_ would like. They don’t always have opportunity to stay at places where they could swim so it’s better to grab it when they can. That isn’t the reason why she’d signed up for the classes, though; Sam hates P.E. more than she hates most things, and she does hate a lot of things lately. Swimming is practically the only activity that makes her feel at least okay, so she takes the chance, even though sacrifices would have to be made. That part she doesn’t expect Dean to understand.

**.x.**

_One. Two. Three. Four._

_One. Two. Three. Four._

Breathe.

“Breathe in six if you can’t do eight,” the instructor had said, but she certainly doesn’t know that Sam’s swimming skills are a little beyond school practice. The tightness in her lungs just before the second four, however, is a reminder that she could be in better shape.

_One. Two. Three. Four._

_One. Two. Three. Four._

Breathe.

There was something very _right_ about swimming. It isn’t a passion - as a matter of fact, it’s just one of those things she _has_ to know - but there is the sound, right as a clock, marking the rhythm of her respiration, the bubbles formed by it, the whoosh of water when her arm passes below her body. In a certain way, it always sounded like something she could count on.

_One. Two. Three. Four._

_One. Two. Three. Four._

Breathe.

What if she breathed at ten? Everything she’s learned about swimming was based on pushing limits - or, to be honest, her whole damn _life_ is about being able to push limits, to go beyond, or just ignore them. She isn’t doing it very well now, though. The problem isn’t breathing or swimming - these things are just background noise. The problem is that swimming hadn’t been background noise until some time ago. It was one of the few activities in Sam’s life that would muffle the sound of her thoughts, but even that is failing now.

She gets out of the pool as soon as the bell rings, taking advantage of the mess of other people doing it at the same time to rush to the locker room, holding her clothes tight against her chest. She knows that no one there will think she is underdressed for someone who just got out of the pool, but it still feels weird.

The problem of getting out as soon as possible, though, is that the locker room is always full. It isn’t that she can’t deal with boys being gross - she lives with Dean, doesn’t she? - but it feels like being thrown into the wrong place. Sam does her best to ignore them as long as they ignore her as well, and thanks God for small blessings like the existence of closed stalls.

She doesn’t take long to shower, but stays there until the noise around her starts to fade. She needs to do some acrobatics to get at least half dressed inside the stall, and only then leaves to the mirrors.

Sam dares to stop a moment to look at the mirror, really look at it. She isn’t sure if all people are that aware of every little detail of their bodies; she doesn’t just wakes up and notices something has changed here and there. Sam is painfully aware of the time it took to that sharp angles settle on her jaw and for her hair to coarsen even more. She can pinpoint the moment it started changing.

She already know how broad her shoulders are and how flat her chest is, and she is perfectly aware that nature won’t ever fix any of it, no matter how long she waits, so she stops looking.

**.x.**

Dean is waiting for her on the parking lot, as usual. Sam sees the smoke before spotting him sitting on the hood.

“God fucking dammit, Sam,” Dean all but growls, fist coming in position to what would definitely hurt if he hadn’t seen it was her sneaking behind him right away. “Warn a guy.”

“Where are your hunter reflexes?”

Dean tries to wrestle her right there on the hood of the car, which doesn’t work very well partially because Sam is still holding her bag, and partially because Dean is still holding a cigarette.

“Shit,” he realizes, throwing the butt away and stepping on it.

“It’s not like I don’t know you smoke.”

“Well, I don’t. Except sometimes. And you could’ve used a towel.”

“My hair won’t dry like that.”

“Whatever you say, princess,” he takes the pack out of his pocket again to take another cigarette and offers Sam one. In his defense, it is almost full.

“I’m good.”

They stay like that for a while. Sam thinks it’s remarkable that Dean is not a chain smoker, considering, well, everything. It probably has to do with Dad anyway. He wouldn’t be any happy to see Dean fucking up his lungs.

 _But the liver is okay to fuck then? Is this a selective organ thing?_ , Dean had said the only time Sam had seen him defy their father that hadn’t involved defending her. She had also seen him deflate afterwards, as if realizing a blasphemy.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks.

“Stuff,” Sam knows better than to insist. “Mom.”

Sam wasn’t waiting for that. She can count on the fingers of one hand the times Dean had talked about their mother without her having to ask.

“I went to the library today,” he continues. “Read about… Well, I got you some of these,” he reaches inside his jacket for some pamphlets and hands them to Sam.

It takes her a second to notice they’re about transexuality.

“Just got me thinking, y’know? Mom was great, man. She’d know how to deal with this stuff so much better.”

Sam can’t really answer for a while, then murmurs a “thanks” when she can find her voice. Dean smokes quietly at her side while she flips the pages, not really reading anything yet. She won’t for a while; she could’ve made some research herself, even tried to sometimes, but would always stop before it got too serious. Sam knew that the moment she committed to knowing more about herself it wouldn’t stop there, and she could only deal with so much disappointment at a time. It wouldn’t help her in anything to know all the things she could not do any time soon.

But that was Dean giving it to her. She knew that he was trying, and that it was hard enough, and still he was taking the time to learn. That meant everything even if the pamphlets ended up in the bottom of some duffel bag.

Dean finishes the cigarette and steps on it again before finally getting inside the car. Sam follows him.

 

**july 1998**

“Hey.”

Dean peers into the room as if it isn’t where he is staying too. Sam turns her head to look at him and then smashes it on the pillow again. She hears the creak of the door opening and closing, then feels the dip of the mattress as Dean sits beside her.

“It looks bad now but--”

“Don’t.”

“There are other girls, y’know…”

“Stop talking right now.”

Dean does, but doesn’t leave immediately. Dad had barely waited for the school year to end before moving again and Sam hadn’t had a lot of time to break up with Ann without looking like an asshole. She is sure she didn’t succeed.

Sam had thought about talking to her about… her stuff. She doesn’t think she would have really done it, but she had _thought about it_ , had rehearsed it in her head and it was the closest she had ever got to dealing with it again since the moment she started to slip more and more into feminine pronouns when thinking of herself.

“Why don’t you _care_ about it?” her voice breaks, hoarse with crying. It’s come to the point where she knows it’s going to settle, goddamn Adam’s apple sticking out, and she hates it. She tries to speak in ways that don’t make it sound so low, to practically swallow her voice back, but there is only so much she can do. Maybe one day, she thinks, so much of swallowing her words and trying to look smaller will finally turn her completely inward and she will disappear. Hopefully.

"It doesn’t matter anymore,” Dean answers, sounding tired. It’s an old argument. Sam barely remembers a time when Dean complained about moving so frequently, but she’s sure it had existed.

Sam is more sad than angry now, a headache coming after all, and she lets Dean’s hand stay in her hair when she feels it. He takes the strand hairs off her face and tucks them back, and stays there a little more before moving to his bed.

 

**august 1999;**

Sam’s been planning this for a week. They have found themselves a small house to spend, as Dad had promised under Dean’s pleading gaze and Sam’s angry but expectant one, Sam’s first semester of school. She has enough experience now to not believe that for a second, but maybe she can drag three or four months out of that so called semester.

The living room is close enough to the bedrooms so that Sam can hear the television as if it was right there. Dad is one second away from passing out on the couch when Sam makes a run for coke on the kitchen. She drapes the blanket that is on the floor back over him on her way back. Dean is out - Sam is sure there is something going on with the grocery store girl - and she, well, she is on a mission.

Sam retrieves the pamphlets from the same hidden pocket where she keeps her cosmetics and lays them on the bed. She had read some of them but purposely avoided the more detailed ones; now it is their time.

She’s used to read quickly because of the hurry of the hunts, but does her best to actually digest what she is reading this time. By the end of it, she has several pages of her notebook filled with notes and a crescent feeling that she is going to implode.

Sam lays down and stares at the ceiling, notebook pressed to her chest. She gets the courage to look at it again after a while; there she had noted the steps necessary to transition, the time it could take and, most importantly right now, the average cost of it all. Not so long ago she had made a similar kind of research about college applications, looking behind herself as if Dad or Dean could show up at any time and find what she was up to.

It was damn near impossible for her to go through one of these things, let alone both.

She dreams about it. Literal dreams that look more like memories than made up narratives, except that she is a girl in them. An honest to God girl, everything in the right place, no one there to say that it is somehow wrong. She has seen trans women before, sometimes on tv, sometimes on the places they pass through, but the underlying steps needed to come from one point to the other - to this current Sam to the one in her dreams - had always been way too abstract. There was a way, sure, but she didn’t know exactly what that could be.

Well, now she does, and that doesn’t make anything better. She won’t ever be able to do any of it, will she? If she can’t stay at the same place long enough she won’t have a chance to go to therapy, to see doctors, to have goddamn surgery - and even if in some alternate reality she could do all of that, she certainly couldn’t just show up to Dad like hey, surprise, I’m a girl now.

He would have to know at some point.

Sam throws the notebook on the floor and presses her eyes with the heels of her hands. Her head had starting to hurt from trying to not cry and she feels sick. She won’t let herself imagine all the possible horrible scenarios where Dad finds out or she tells him, but one thing she knows for sure; he would hate her. He would hate her and she would have to give up or go away and she would never see them again. She’d never see Dean again, would she?

Sam bolts to the bathroom to throw up.

**.x.**

The new school has a semi-olympic pool and Sam gets into the habit of watching it. She can’t get herself to sign up to swimming again, not when it only gets harder and harder to step out of her clothes. She’s on a regime of minimal interaction with her body with no prevision to get any better.  

She sits near the pool with the notes from English class and a granola bar she’s been staring at since lunch. She wonders if her stomach somehow shrunk or if she just doesn’t acknowledge hunger anymore for ignoring it for so long. She doubts she can stop growing taller, but maybe she can keep from bulking up. Just maybe.

A whistle marks the end of training and Sam starts to gather her things, granola bar only half eaten, when she nearly bumps into one of the swimmers.

“Whoa, sorry,” she says.

“Hey. You’re the new kid?” he asks as if he isn’t one step from dripping water on her books, but he sounds friendly instead of in the mood of picking on Sam, so she doesn’t go away.

“Uh. Yeah, I guess. Sam. Winchester. Sam,” she answers and cringes mentally. This is going just great.

“I’m Miles. My hand is wet, so...”

“Yeah, I’m holding books, so.”

“Okay, then,” he says. He has a nice smile, not that Sam is noticing or something. “See you.”

“Okay.”

**.x.**

Miles is pressing her against a wall between the shelves of the library, and it is only slightly weird because he is only a few inches shorter than her. Sam can’t say it is better or worse than being kissed by a girl, only different, very different - well, for one, Miles is broader than her. And he most definitely has a hard on.

Sam is hard too; there was no other way to put this.

She had been fairly okay with the eventual girlfriends she would have for a month or two when she was younger and second base territory was mostly above the waist. But as everything else in her life, it only got worse as she got older. It makes it look like she doesn’t want to get off; she does, but not like that. It’s not like the girls didn’t know what she had inside her pants, but Sam knew too and that was the problem.

For the last few weeks, though, Sam had been redirecting Miles to her ass when he would try to palm her through her pants. He seems to like it, probably interprets that Sam is just eager; well, again, she is, but not only in that way.

Sam gets home as she always has when she has some action; slightly frustrated but still kind of dreamy. Her ass feels funny. She knows it is possible to get off just with fingers, but she never really managed to reach it and Miles don’t really have a proper place to try. It is still good, though.

She finds Dean sitting on the grass on their little backyard, reading the _Animal farm_ paperback she had got for school two towns back. Sam sits by his side and rests her head on his shoulder. It’s a warm night and Dad is not around the house; he has probably gone hunting somewhere else. She will ask Dean in minute. Maybe two.

“You reek of quarterback,” Dean says lightly, not taking the eyes off the book.

“He’s on the swimming team, actually.”

“It’s all sports,” he mumbles back, then adds. “He treats you right?”

“ _Yeah_.”

“Alright, alright, you can stop smiling now. Gross.”

He doesn’t make her leave, so she justs adjusts better and closes her eyes. Dean’s not wearing his jacket but he smells like leather nonetheless. It doesn’t take long to the sunlight to fade and Dean closes the book. He passes an arm around her, brings her closer, fingers idly tracing patterns on her arm. She misses that kind of proximity, now so much rarer the older they get.

“Is Dad out of town?”

“Bobby called,” Dean says as a way of explanation. Dad had probably been the one who called Bobby, though, restless the way he had been lately for all the supposedly missed hunts.

“You won’t go with him?” she asks, moving to look at him. She can go a long time without noticing how young Dean is too, but that night he does look so much like himself instead of some carbon copy of Dad that it hurts a little. 

“No.”  


**march 2000;**

Sam slips twenty dollars from the money she’d won -- _stolen_ would fit better-- hustling pool with Dean on the old wallet where she’s saving money. Dean doesn’t pretend he doesn’t see it, later she won’t pretend she doesn’t know there is twenty more on top of the first one. She keeps the wallet in yet another pocket of the worn down duffel bag that only gets heavier with all the secrets it keeps.

In less than two years she will finish high school and she can see the countdown as if it had been plastered on her father’s forehead. He thinks they finally won’t need to stop anywhere any longer than necessary once she doesn’t have to study anymore. Sam senses the countdown backwards; instead of calming it only makes her anxious. She doesn’t tell herself that the money is for application fees just because she doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality of it.

She blocks it out again as she cleans the dirt and blood caked under her nails from their last hunt on the boards of the lake. They had found themselves a lake in a godforsaken town and that had been the highest point of her year so far.

“Wanna go in?” she hears Dean ask at some point behind her.

“Not really,” she says, then feels the need to explain. “The water is cold.”

“Chicken,” Dean says as he ruffles her hair on his way to the lake, already halfway out of his clothes.

Sam feels older than she’s supposed to, as if everything had the ability to wear her out, just not physically. She wonders if souls can wear out too, or if they even exist. If they do, hers must be in a bad shape. She’s tired of being so self conscious, so aware of the wrong wiring of her body to the point that it takes up all that she is. She finds solace looking for Dean on herself; on the shape of her hands, on their shared movements, on the way they look at things instead of the shape of their eyes. It pulls her to the outside.

Dean is making a brave impression of not feeling cold as he walks into the water. There are a few new scars on his back, wounds she had patched up herself and that they were both too young to have. She wonders if someday Dean will find someone along the way, some woman that will wake up with him every night, no matter where they were travelling --because Dean will never stop travelling, will he-- and if she will trace that scars and ask how he got them. She wonders if he’ll tell her. Sometimes, when Sam’s patching him up and he sounds like a wounded animal, she thinks these moments are only theirs to have. It’s a weird sort of intimacy, built on blood and broken bones, but it is theirs. It’s theirs.

Sam takes a deep breath and stands up, starts taking her clothes off without looking down. Dean is floating a few feet away, shamelessly watching her as if they weren’t too old for skinny dipping. She doesn’t take the boxers off as she gets in, taking a few strokes in his direction and then stopping, as if they had made an appointment there and something was about to happen.

“You okay?”, Dean asks, and Sam wonders when was the last time she got to ask it first.

“Sure.”

Dean sighs but doesn’t insist, decides to splash water on her face instead. It’s not that Sam is a good liar, or that Dean is easy to fool, but rather that both of them don’t know how to go from there.

“I’m freezing,” Dean snorts the best he can when his teeth start to chatter.

“I told you.”

They will freeze if they keep still so Sam dives down to explore; she can see the blurred shape of Dean’s legs and arms moving to keep floating on the turbid water, the smell of mud when she comes up for air a welcome change from the chlorinated pool at school.

Dean splashes water on her and holds her head under water as any other time they’ve swum together. They do their best to wrestle without drowning each other till it starts getting dark. Sam wants to believe the lump on her throat as their gather their clothes is the beginning of a cold, not the odd realization that this sort of afternoon somehow already belongs to the past. She’s shivering when Dean puts his jacket over her shoulders; it must definitely be a cold, she thinks.

 

**june 2001;**

“Eat.”

Dean pushes a sandwich in her direction with that menacing look that usually means he is going to try to grab her book. She only holds it tighter and shakes her head.

“‘m not hungry.”

“Asked nobody,” he says, giving the plate another nudge. His hair is sticking out in every direction as if he had just rolled out of bed to make her breakfast before she had a chance to run, which Sam has no doubts was exactly what he’d done. Sam tenses when he walks around the table and stops behind her, has to swallow something dangerously close to a whimper when he touches her hair.

She’d had to cut it the night before. It’s not like she didn’t know she’d have to do it periodically, or that it would grow again anyway, but she already has so little to count on that every little bit means a lot.

“Don’t do that,” Sam says when he won’t go away.

“Why not?”

“‘Cause I like it.”

Dean’s hands stop moving but linger there for a moment more. He lets them fall to her shoulders, squeezes for a second and leaves from behind her to go grab his own coffee.

Sam rips the sandwich in increasingly smaller parts, eating some in the process. Her skin feels hot where he touched her, the ghost of his hands imprinted there.

**.x.**

Sam manages to get out of the ceremony all of ten minutes after all students leave the pulpit, holding her diploma tight as if someone would try to take it away from her. She ditches the rented robe and the cap on the benches, smiles to the classmates she had only knew for barely two months and finds Dean waiting for her on the parking lot as any other day.

“You made it,” he says, eyes crinkling at the corners.

“I did, yeah,” she is a little out of breath, and they just stood there for a while; Sam has confetti in her hair, Dean has the sun on his face.

“Brought us beer,” he finally says.

“Don’t let my teachers hear you say that.”

“What they don’t know can’t get us in trouble, c’mon.”

They don’t get so far from the school; just enough so that they can sit on grass and watch the commotion without having to participate. Sam rechecks a list in her mind, to make sure she signed and got all the papers she needed to prove she’s finished school and never step there again. She did, she’s free.

“When we’re leaving?” she asks. Dean raises an eyebrow at it.

“Dunno, Dad’s still got shit to wrap up. You ain’t gonna say your goodbyes to your friends?”

“Ain’t got none.”

She takes another swig of her beer without looking at Dean, but can still feel his eyes on her. She thinks she can feel it too; a last slice of innocence lost forever. It’s just not worth it to get attached to people anymore, Sam reasons. This is the sort of thing that she’s been watching happen to her as if it was happening to someone else. Maybe it is the effort to detach herself enough to get away. Maybe she needs to build another Sam on top of the old one to make it out of it alive.

Dean opens his mouth as if to ask her something, then shakes his head and ruffles her hair instead. After that his hand doesn’t go back to where it was; he lets his arm slide behind her, tugs her closer. He’s so silent Sam wonders if he figured her out.

“Just stay here with me then,” he says, letting go of her to take his pack out of his pocket. He’s still talking about the ceremony, she tells herself as he lights his cigarette. He’s still talking about the ceremony.

 

**january 2002;**

“Stay still,” Sam hisses; her skin is tight where the mud had dried, Dean’s muscle rigid under her fingers with the effort he is making not to shiver. They hadn’t had time to dry themselves before Sam had to start patching him up and Dean had coughed twice already, making more blood gush between Sam’s fingers where she is trying to keep the gash in his collarbone closed. She figures that if doesn’t die of blood loss, pneumonia will still be a strong candidate if she doesn’t finish it soon.

Stitching is a practiced motion but it doesn’t make her hate it any less; the fact that it means that they can’t just go to a hospital and explain what they have been doing -- _hey, doctor, my brother was thrown into a river by a particularly strong vengeful spirit and almost drowned there_ \--, that they have to do things that will cause it to them in the first place. So her breath comes out in puffs, and her teeth hurts because of how tight she has clenched her jaw. Sam sighs with relief when she knots the last stitch; it isn’t her best job, but it probably won’t be the last anyway.

She wraps him up in the blankets from both his bed and hers and goes looking for a washcloth. Dean hadn’t spoken a word since they got back to the motel and that is making her uneasy as she cleans the blood off him. He finally starts grunting when she tries to ease more of his weight of the wounded side.

“What was that?”

“Water,” Dean says grumpily.

“I’ll be back,” she tells him unnecessarily as she walks the few feet to the minibar, but it is something she’d like to hear if she were the one in bed.

Sam resists the urge to help while Dean struggles to put his weight on his right shoulder to get up. Hell, she’ll hold his head up so he can drink if she has to, but she only has to hold the glass. Dean lets himself fall heavily back on bed and if it wasn’t for the bandage one could think he was just hungover.

“We got ‘em good, Sammy,” Dean says, the lazy smile Sam knew was supposed to tranquilize her making an appearance. She murmurs a yeah and grabs the first book that’s sticking out of her bag, sitting beside Dean on the too small bed. She doubts he’ll care; he is already sleeping anyway.

Sam is bone tired too, in a desperate need for a shower, but she won’t move from there. She doesn’t know what book she is holding, not even after reading the first paragraph of a random page five times, but she needs something to hold on.

She never liked the idea of her and Dean hunting alone. She never liked hunting, period. Technically, John had been helping them some, a phone call here and there, instructions, advice, or whatever he would call it, but he had bigger things to worry about that for some reason they couldn’t go along.

Their hunt was supposed to be a easy thing, and all things considered, Sam thought, it actually had been. Except that Dean was hurt, and they weren’t supposed to do that kind of thing in the first place, and yet here they were.

Dad had been the one to track the possible poltergeist in the papers and Sam still argued in her head if it was their fault or not that the first and only death caused by it happened right by the time they arrived in town. Till they arrived there and Dad gave his instructions in a rush before leaving again, it had just been a haunted house. Maybe they took too long to get there. Maybe.

They still had enough baby fat so they couldn’t pull the fake agent thing, but the victim had been just a kid, and they got in the house on the day of the funeral under the pretense of being his friends. Not that they needed a strong background story with all that the parents were crying and not really paying that much attention to who was getting in.

There were a lot of people in the house, friends and family and there in daylight Sam could almost believe there was nothing wrong with the house at all. Dean found his way upstairs to look around while Sam stayed near the stairs, and eventually she ended up in the room where they were mourning the body.

Sam had seen plenty of corpses for a lifetime, be it monsters that took the form of humans or dead bodies being dug out of their graves. She was familiarized enough with the smell of cemeteries to not flinch at it anymore, but this was a house, and the person inside the coffin in the middle of the room couldn’t be much older than her nor much younger than Dean. His face wasn’t rotten yet and that almost had Sam nauseous; it was just like he was sleeping, except that there was cotton filling his nostrils, and the color on his face was make up, and his parents were there to know that he wouldn’t ever, ever wake up again.

“How many people will mourn us if we die?” Sam had wondered aloud when they got back to the Impala, the roaring of the engine somehow still not louder than a mother crying to Sam’s ears. Dean hadn’t answered.

**.x.**

Dawn finds Sam a couple hours later on the exact same spot, head resting on the wall and arms crossed. She stares at Dean for a few seconds more before finally getting out of bed. They are in a motel room this time, there’s not enough space to pace around and try to figure out what to do.

She ends up cleaning the mess they had made last night; the patches of gauze and tape on the floor, the clothes spilled out of their bags in the rush to get all the things she needed to stitch Dean up. He wakes up by the second time she goes check his bandages; the bleeding had stopped long ago and the wound looked as okay as it could be at that point.

He looks up lazily at her for a second, brow furrowed as if he’s taking in the pain now that he’s awake.

“Go back to sleep,” she says, but Dean’s already more alert than a minute ago, trying to turn her around and twisting his neck.

“You hurt?” he asks.

“No, _you’re_ hurt,” _and that’s your blood in my clothes_ , she doesn’t add. Dean seems to think that is good enough and lets himself sink on the pillow again, but Sam knows that restlessness when she sees it.

“I’m gross and you smell like cemetery dirt,” Dean pouts, and the snort Sam would probably give him in better circumstances becomes a fond smile.

“If this is code for saying that you want to shower, my medical opinion is that I don’t think you should pull on your stitches just yet.”

“Well, thanks for the advice, doctor,” Dean says, already making his way out of the bed. Sam said that out of concern but Dean is well experienced on the arts of moving around injured, probably due as much to his stubbornness as to his awareness that he can’t fuck up too bad. “I’m a grown ass man.”

“You’re a grown ass idiot,” Sam sighs and walks before him to the bathroom, opening up the shower curtain to make his way easier. She stops him before he gets in. “At least take you clothes off where the floor isn’t wet.”

That gets her an eye roll as Dean manages to open his fly before giving up and sitting in the nearest bed. Sam figures what he would have to do to get out of the pants seemed less ridiculous to him sitting than standing; she watches him shimmy out of them for all of a minute before she takes pity on him and pulls them by the legs, because she’s just that nice.

“Dad called?” he asks, and just like that Sam doesn’t even have to make an effort to not acknowledge the fact that Dean is taking his underwear off as well. What exactly did she expect, though.

“No,” she answers, and turns away to get the shower going and not see the face Dean will pull to mask the disappointment this time.

“You ain’t coming?” he asks her when he steps into the shower, holding a ripped plastic bag on top of the bandages. Sam takes the roll of tape he is holding out for her and starts cutting pieces to hold the plastic in place, considering the question. She’s already going to help him shower, that much he probably knows, but he had looked at her from head to toe in a way that suggested he was talking about actually joining him.

Sam could definitely use a shower; now that most of the adrenaline of the last night had come down she feels almost heavy with the layers of dirt, blood and sweat. She is also tired enough to shrug off whatever reservations she may have and starts taking her clothes off as well. Sam is aware of Dean’s eyes on her; he isn’t as good at diverting his look as she is, she can always catch the tail of it, as if he only decided to look the other way on the last possible second.

She steps in the shower, half hoping it will wash away the day before, the last other two also if possible. Dean turns the hot water on and they just stay there for a while, the water making a funnel ending on their noses while they look down at the brown reddish water running from their bodies to the drain.

Here’s a list of the things Sam knows. She’s the same height as Dean now; when their hair is wet they look like they’re the same color; she is a woman; there’s a thick envelope hidden inside one her bags, a passport to the end of her life as she knows it; she sometimes catches Dean looking at her as if he knows it too; as if she already belongs to a past he can’t reach anymore either.

“Mind the…” she nudges him a little to the right so the water won’t catch his bandages. Dean holds on to her arm and his hand travels up to her shoulder, her neck, her nape. She’s not surprised when he kisses her; she’s not surprised at the gentleness of it, at the way he stops every now and then to just brush his lips over hers, fingers getting caught on her wet hair as he tries to move it from her face. Sam thinks for a moment that God is going to have to come down personally to pull her out of Dean’s life. She also thinks He won’t have to because she’s already made up her mind. Leaving is going to hurt so bad, she tells herself at each nip at her lips, nearly flinching as if she’s preparing for the severing of an arm.

Dean puts some distance between them just enough to look at her, self-conscious smile tugging at the corner of his lips, eyes round and big as if he’s scared of what he’s doing but also sure, so damn sure.

Oh boy, will it hurt.


End file.
